When a boyfriend broke-up with her by email, French artist Sophie Calle asked 107 women to read the letter and to analyse it according to their professional interest. It was set to music, re-ordered by a crossword-setter, performed by an actress, and probed by a forensic psychiatrist, amongst others…

You might not know it from looking at her work, but French artist Sophie Calle insists that she is a fairly happy person. Well, she is now, anyway. Over the last two decades, Calle has made it her business to follow, peek into, and outright spy on the lives of people she barely knows, with results that both illustrate human vulnerability and tend not infrequently to pathos….

Sophie Calles art mixes image and text to provoke the kind of intense emotional response usually inspired by epic literature or film. Her most extraordinary works address rather ordinary human tendencies, from the morbid curiosity informing LHomme au Carnet (The Address Book, 1983) to the amorous betrayal of Douleur Exquise (Exquisite Pain, 19842003), but Calle knows how to up the ante and amplify a generic foible into a tragic flaw. Shes a master manipulator who has taken the pushing of personal buttons to the level of fine art…